I love acting. It is so much more real than life’, declares Lord Henry in Dorian Gray, suggesting that a performance is not the opposite of truth but a version of it, a potentiality turned into reality. Who Wilde actually was, we shall never know. Certainly not by reading the dozens of biographies on him nor by dissecting his works to the bone. The first to undermine the idea of a true, real, Wilde was Wilde himself. By challenging simplistic dichotomies between truth and lie, self and mask, reality and fiction, he points to something that we tend to dismiss: that individuality is an artificial construct and that a human being is the sum of multiple identities, fluid and multifaceted in its essence.

The scent of roses, the soft sweet summer breeze, the fluttering of birds’ wings and the fragrance of hawthorn blossom pervading the air. Dorian, preceded by an aura – so extraordinarily handsome was he – and accompanied by such splendour. His hair was golden, his eyes were sky-blue and his lips like rose-buds. He was possessed of a regal bearing, and, at the same time, he was pure and unworldly, unaware of how he could fas- cinate the world around him. Dorian was a prodigy. When art crossed the path before him it became a muse for him, a muse of the beautiful, of the divine and of the eternal. How could so much beauty disappear and deteriorate over time? A canvas, then, so that this beauty would be crystallized. It all began from a paint- ing which, as crude and poor and meaningless as it was, immortalised the allure of the young Dorian, captured on canvas by the able Sir Basil.

The painter’s eyes flicked swiftly over the young man’s features, and they re- produced him, brush stroke after brush stroke, Dorian’s gaze from out of the canvas became stronger and stronger – his face, his eyes, his soul. Art turning the mortal into the eternal.
The cloth that concealed the painting was pulled aside and, at long last, Dorian could admire himself. Flattered, he blushed, a smile rippled across his lips. All of a sudden, all the words he had spent upon the brevity of life came to his mind, words on Man’s mortality and on beauty. A physical pain took hold of him, ripping apart that moment of joy. His soul was deeply distraught.

Why was the picture allowed to stay young and beautiful forever? Why was his destiny that of inexorably shrivelling up like an Autumn leaf? Dorian felt as if eternal beauty was beyond his reach, and he wished so ardently to step away from the flow of time. He was not able to accept human finiteness.
In order to achieve such an objective, he gathered within him a determination that would break all confines of normality. There was no sentiment that was worth cultivating: neither love, nor friendship, nor family. There was only room for his new self. There was nothing in the world that he would not barter for eternal youth. If the soul was conscience, then he would rid himself of it for immortality.

Life became endless and with it so did his vices and his pleasures, his crimes and his excesses. His blood flowed through his hands and upon the canvas. It was the canvas that bore the signs of all of his ruthless behaviour, turn- ing into the reflection of the long-forgotten conscience of the younger Dorian. Until a voice from deep inside him reawakened. When others pointed at him for his beauty and fame, he no longer felt gratified. The quiet quiver he felt on account of his own incredible personal achievement began to weaken and the sensual fulfilment inside his soul no longer seduced his senses. He felt as if he had sullied himself, corrupting his mind, entrapping the minds of others, and relishing all of it. Was there a remedy within his reach?

Who could he accuse – if not the man who created him – of all of this? How could he not hate Sir Basil, the painter who had been the God Creator of all of his misfortune? Would he then extinguish the object of his perdition?Destroying the picture would mean returning to that lost purity, to that past genuineness. Yet, standing before the painting, Dorian flinched. An unjust reflection of his conscience appeared in front of him. A horrendous, withered old man with hands oozing blood and a sneer upon his lips. He trembled in front of a painting that he could not bear to behold. However, once more, his mind gained courage. Once his past had been destroyed, freedom would have been returned to him, cleansing him of every evil. A slash of a knife, a gash in the canvas, a scream of terror and sudden collapse.